30 days with Ubuntu 7.04 - Part IV

By Niall C. Brady, May/June 2007.
If you wish to re-publish this article (or parts of), then you are free to do so as long as it links back to here.

<< Part I (Days 1-5)

<< Part II (Days 6-10)

<< Part III (Days 11-15)

Part IV (Days 16-20)

* the goodweather applet
* more gdesklets
* burning audio cd's with k3b
* more updates

>> Part V (Days 21-25)

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The goodweather applet

The weather applets in gdesklets don't seem to work for me at all, I always get 'retrieval failed'. So after some quick googling I find this and take it's advice and download the goodweather applet. Now it works, but I do have to configure it for my locale, so I pop over to http://www.weather.com and find my 'weather code' which is SWXX0020 for Malmo, Sweden.

Back to top ^^

More gdesklets

This avant dock is cool, I have to admit, but the gdesklets icons keep bouncing up and down and it's getting a bit annoying. I probably have to do something with it to configure this but i'm too tired to think :-)

Luckily, IRC has lots of useful advice when it comes to problems like this and even BEFORE I asked about it guess what happened

(from EFNET/#ubuntu)

[leftyfb] drag some .desktop files to your avant bar making them launchers
[leftyfb] and run gdesklets from the CLI
[leftyfb] that way it doesn't show up in your taskbar

thanks leftyfb!

The desktop backgrounds below in my Ubuntu screenshots were taken from here

Burning audio cd's with k3b

Even though Ubuntu is gnome based (unless you are using kubuntu), my favorite cd burning application in linux is k3b. I decided to test k3b and started it up with the intention of burning an audio cd (mp3's to cd). I was greeted with a warning:-

K3b could not load or find the Mp3 decoder plugin. This means that you will not be able to create Audio CDs from Mp3 files. Many Linux distributions do not include Mp3 support for legal reasons. Solution: To enable Mp3 support, please install the MAD Mp3 decoding library as well as the K3b MAD Mp3 decoder plugin (the latter may already be installed but not functional due to the missing libmad). Some distributions allow installation of Mp3 support via an online update tool (i.e. SuSE's YOU).

I started up synaptic, and searched for k3b, scrolling through the list I found one called libk3b2-mp3

The KDE cd burning application library - MP3 decoder - Medibuntu package K3b is a GUI frontend to the cd recording programs cdrdao and cdrecord. Its aim is to provide a very user friendly interface to all the tasks that come with cd recording and a lot more.

This package contains runtime libraries for the MP3 decoder plugin

And that sounds like what I need, so I select it (mark for installation) and close down k3b. Once I had applied the update, I started k3b again, this time I got no warning and was able to burn an audio cd !

more updates

One New update available, and its for the avant-dock, so I chose to update it and that in turn popped up a warning about the software, because it's not from a 'trusted' source. I chose to install the update anyway because avant-dock is cool :-)

>> Part V (Days 21-25)

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(c) http://www.linux-noob.com 2007.
Please send corrections/suggestions/spelling mistakes to anyweb First draft: June 04, 2007.